Suzanne Bates: Early childhood education not panacea

By Suzanne Bates

Published
9:59 am EST, Saturday, November 22, 2014

The early childhood lobby wants you to believe that getting children in school a year earlier is going to lead to big educational gains for our schoolchildren — especially our economically disadvantaged schoolchildren — but the research does not support that claim.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have embraced this idea, and not just in Connecticut. There is a nationwide movement toward lowering the age kids start school to four years old.

The problem is that there is no proof that starting children a year earlier will be a true benefit, and before we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this expansion we should make sure it is the right fix for our schools and especially for our children.

The most comprehensive study of early childhood education, a decade-long study of the Head Start program conducted for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that children who attended Head Start made some early academic gains, but that those advantages disappeared by third grade.

Disappointed by the findings, this study was released by the federal government in 2012 just four days before Christmas in 2012, and it was not broadly publicized.